Bat Attack

The other night I was sitting in the dining room relaxing and watching "Precious" on my computer.  Jon was away at his overnight bachelor party, so I was all alone in the house taking advantage of his absence to finish the ice cream. I had just finished my final show at Comedy Sportz, and was relaxing in the dark before I went to bed.  

All of the sudden, something started making a strange chattering screeching noise and some crashing noises told me things were being knocked on the floor. Before I could get up, or even turn around to look, something small and light whacked me on the back of the head!  I saw a black streak fly past my eyes and realized a bat had just whammed into the back of my head!  A real, honest to goodness demon bat, inside my house.

In the split second it took me to jump up, I noticed my roommate's cats in hot pursuit of the bat. I dashed into the living room to get away, and the BAT CHASED ME! It was literally chasing me, chattering and squealing away. It clearly had rabies, because what rational tiny animal chases a big shrieking animal (me)? I should also note that in a dark creepy house, alone at three in the morning, with a bat chasing me, I wasn't thinking very rationally. I became much more scared than I should have been of such a tiny animal. I dashed into my bedroom as quickly as I could, slamming the door tightly behind me. I paused to breathe and heard the same chattering behind me, but louder and angrier.

I HAD TRAPPED THE BAT IN THE DOOR!

His wing was stuck in the door and his body and other wing were on my side of the door, angrily flapping around. I was now trapped in my room with a furious bat. I couldn't open the door without the bat falling on my arm and crawling up my sleeve so he could bit my armpit.

At this point I decided the most rational course of action would be to start weeping and call Jon while he is on his memorable once-in-a-lifetime bachelor party.  I had to wade through his best man who was in charge of his cell phone, but after a few minutes of incoherent yelling, the best man handed the phone over.  Jon was about four hours away. He tried to calm me down and convince me that I had to open the door, trap the bat in a bag and humanly kill it. I knew all this, of course, but having Jon talk to me calmed me down enough (sort of) to actually do it. I climbed out the window and went back in the kitchen to get an empty cereal box to trap the bat inside. I then opened the door with the bat in it from the opposite side. I opened  and shut the door quickly so that the bat wouldn't get me on his way out of the door. Well, this turned out to be a bad choice, because by the time I opened the door a second time, the bat had hidden somewhere in my room. I could hear him chattering angrily, but couldn't see him anywhere. I had hoped the dogs would help me, but they were surprisingly apathetic about the wounded animal in their midst. This from one dog that regularly catches and eats wild baby geese in springtime and another dog that literally swallowed a half-rotten baby rabbit the other day. No help with the wounded bat though.  He MUST have rabies, right?  That's why the dogs wouldn't eat him?

I finally found the bat in a shoe and was able to get it into an the cereal box. He clearly had a broken wing. I was crying pretty hard still, from a lot of different emotions. I was still scared of the bat (They're scary in the middle of the night with their loud chattering and tiny sharp teeth and ugly faces!), I was tired and stressed out from all the wedding plans/unemployment/moving apartments/uncertainty about the future, I felt really bad for breaking its wing and I knew I was going to have to kill it. For all these reasons, I was a big mess.

I was finally able to trap it in a cereal box and take it outside and step on it. I felt really bad about it. I knew it was the most humane thing to do, but I still felt awful.

It wasn't until the next day that I realized what I SHOULD have done, of course. When the bat was bleeping chasing me, I should have just RUN OUTSIDE! Run outside!